Absurd Freedom

Now the main thing is done, I hold certain facts from which I cannot separate. What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject – this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in the world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my human condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me – that is what I understand. And these two certainties – my appetite for the absolute and for the unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle – I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without brining in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus

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“It is difficult to refrain from the relief of irony, from the luxury of contempt, when surveying the mess that meek hands, obedient tentacles guided by the bloated octopus of the state, have managed to make out of the that fiery, fanciful free thing – literature. Even more: I have learned to treasure my disgust, because I know that by feeling so strongly about it I am saving what I can for the spirit of Russian literature. Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer. Living as you do in freedom, in that spiritual open where you were born and bred, you may be apt to regard stories of prison life coming from remote lands as exaggerated accounts spread by panting fugitives. That a country exists where for almost a quarter of a century literature has been limited to illustrating the advertisements of a firm of slave-traders is hardly credible to people for whom writing and reading books is synonymous with having and voicing individual opinions. But if you do not believe in the existence of such conditions, you may at least imagine them, and once you have imagined them you will realize with new purity and pride the value of real books written by free men for free men to read.” -Vladimir Nabokov, Lecture on Russian Literature.

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For an artist one consolation is that in a free country he is not actually forced to produce guidebooks. -Vladimir Nabokov

Found this gem in Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature, which came on the heels of an interesting Writer’s Almanac discussing the New Deal Federal Writers Project, which employed writers during the depression and produced most notably guidebooks on the 48 states.

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The last several months it seems like more and more people are finding out about what we do at CrossFit Walter Reed and we are getting bombarded with emails asking us how we started the program and if we have any advice for starting a similar program for wounded veterans and/or active duty at other bases. The following is what we did and what I recommend you do.

Don’t ask anybody’s permission.

Dillon Behr, the founder of CrossFit Walter Reed, is a former Green Beret and patient at Walter Reed Army Hospital. He shadowed sessions with two injured vets that I was training at Potomac CrossFit, grabbed some guys that were still at the hospital, got his CrossFitting girlfriend who worked at the hospital to corral some more guys, and held a class.

He didn’t ask permission of the command, he didn’t ask permission of the gym. He used initiative and just did it.

This is the most important thing to remember in trying to start something like this up. Don’t ask anybody and don’t accept “no” as a response from anybody.*

“Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” -Mattis

There will be people on base that love CrossFit and will sell their first born to help you out.

There will be others that think that CrossFit guarantees injury and is just another fitness fad that they need to keep their people from ever trying.

As you develop your program, you have a very delicate balancing act of trying to get enough attention that you can continue to attract athletes, but not so much attention that members of the command that might be antagonistic to your program find out about it.

What is critical is finding your “Rabbis”. These are folks with pull and/or rank within the command that when you have somebody that’s really inhibiting what you can do (and this usually comes in the form of crippling bureaucracy, not outright “no’s”), you can ask them to step in.

Charity

We are supported by a 501(c)3 called Team R4V which is a great organization that does everything they can for us.

We get the majority of our support from the U.S. Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment (which is not affiliated with the Wounded Warrior Fund). Also, CrossFit HQ donated $25,000 worth of gear for our use.

If/when you start a CrossFit gym or program for Wounded Warriors, you are going to get your email blown up with offers to partner and/or help out from individuals and charities.

I certainly trust Team R4V, but with the vast number of people that have set up veteran’s charities and then pocketed most of the money, you have to vet who you work with. A great resource for this are GuideStar.Org. Every 501(c)3 has to post their tax returns on their website as well. So if you can’t find it, ask for a link to it and what you are trying to find out is what their fundraising amount was last year, what was the salary of their key personnel, and how much was spent on programs versus overhead.

If you can pull it off, get the command to roger up support and you don’t have to worry about this.

Coaches

Vetting should be foremost in your mind when selecting coaches too. You need to find people that are motivated, competent, and will show up week in and week out without flaking.

There are probably a million CrossFitters that love the “idea” of being a CrossFit Walter Reed coach, but experience has proved that only about six people can pull it off.

Most folks that have volunteered have un-volunteered. This doesn’t make them bad people. More or less we have this program covered, and an hour commuting and another hour of training in the middle of the day every week just isn’t workable for most folks.

When folks get in touch to help out, we have them just come in and workout with the guys. This gives us a chance to do some butt sniffing and gauge their competence and character. If they seem flaky or don’t seem qualified to coach, we tell them to keep coming in just to workout. This gauges their dedication and we can continue to screen.

Most folks figure out that they don’t have the time to come in and that the “Stand by Me” moments they were expecting aren’t the same as reality. So these folks just stop showing up.

The folks that demonstrate they are committed and competent get an assistant coach slot in one of our classes and we develop them from there.

Training

Oh yeah, you have to do that too.

This has been discussed plenty of time on our blog and on my resources post. What I’ll say briefly is this:

1) The plan only survives first enemy contact. You need to go with the flow because your workout with running and rowing will have 10 athletes and nine of them will be bilateral amputees that can’t run or row. Come up with a different plan and execute.

2) Don’t hurt these guys. Their bodies are spending a significant amount of energy healing itself. You need to give them a solid dose, or they won’t come back. But if you break them, they won’t come back either.

Hope this helps some folks, if you have questions, post to comments. And as always, essem plena cacas.

*If we ever have a drink, ask me about Marine Corps Community Services, LtCol Dan Wilson (who is an outstanding Marine Officer), and Operation Phoenix to find out how bad things can get with dealing with entrenched quasi-private interests.

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We’re getting a ton of questions about what we call “Adaptive CrossFit” and I’m sending the same info to folks. Below is a consolidated list of POCs and resources to help folks out that have questions about this:

Dave “Chef” Wallach, CrossFit Rubicon, chef@cfrubicon.com.

Chef is, so far as I know, the most qualified Adaptive CrossFit coach on earth. He trains a bunch of amputees and TBI’s out of CrossFit Rubicon, has an amputee and TBI on his coaching staff, and has a very sophisticated technical understanding of exercise and injury. He was the organizer of the first ever Adaptive CrossFit competition last November at CrossFit Rubicon, the Working Wounded Games.

Brian Wilson (your humble author), Patriot CrossFit/Potomac CrossFit/CrossFit Walter Reed. brian@crossfitwalterreed.com.

I’m the hack that you can find taking up most of the screen time on Adaptive CrossFit videos. Outside of that I’m the Director of Operations and Co-Founder of CrossFit Walter Reed. In this roll, I take a bunch of credit while the CrossFit Walter Reed coaches Jason Sturm, Shad Lorenz, Danna Rey, Andrea Bates, Steve Michael, and volunteers do all the work (no, seriously).

If none of the above dissuaded you, you can still email me (or better yet post to comments!).

You can find several additional POCs on the Adaptive CrossFit thread on the CrossFit Message Board including Kim Hanna, Rick Martinez, and Kendra Bailey.

Here’s some resources to dig through.

Evolution of Adaptation
Adaptive Assets

A CrossFit Love Story
Adapt and Overcome: The Nick Thom Story

A Lucky Olympian

If there are other resources and POCs out there, please post to comments and I’ll put them in this post. If they aren’t in the above list, it’s not because I don’t like you or I think they’re dumb, I just don’t know they exist.

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“When people want the impossible, only liars will satisfy them.” -Thomas Sowell

I try dance somewhat delicately* in the realm of “self-helpiness”. I’ve talked about this before with coaching, goals (here, here, here), motivation, and specifically the Greg Admunson Goal Setting seminar, which is still offered a few times a year.

I want to make it clear (again) that Greg seems like an incredibly nice guy who honestly thinks that these types of things work.

But I think this stuff is just horse shit. These things are not empirical. They are not “observable, measurable and repeatable.” They are built on faith. Faith in that if you do them, they will work.

Now there are people like Greg in this industry who I think honestly feel that what they do helps people. But there is the majority of folks in the self-help business that are exactly the same as the politicians that Hayek describes in his chapter “Why the Worst Get On Top” in Road to Serfdom:

Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian leader would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.

In the world of self-help, where what your trying to sell to people is completely contrary to human nature, the only people that would deceive themselves and others that they should keep it up are the amoral. That’s why the majority of men and women who survive and thrive in this industry are hucksters, frauds, charlatans and thieves.

Whatever their followers do, it’s not good enough. Not happy? Not meeting your goals? Well your thetan has issues that can only be remediated by paying the church of Scientology thousands of dollars to get more training.**

Now there are tricks, superstitions, heuristics, etc, that don’t seem to make sense but can provide some degree of positive change for people. In the immortal words of Crash Davis, “If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you ARE! And you should know that!”

But there’s a tremendous difference in my mind between what Crash describes that is basically “if whatever you are doing works, keep doing it” and the Eckhart Tolle/Tony Robbins/The Secret cabal which is built around pulling vast amounts of wealth from productive people to tell them how they can be more productive so they can pull more wealth from them. Not to mention that these self-help people have never been successful at anything except selling more and more self-help books, seminars, and deadly sweat lodge retreats.***

So what’s the lesson here for me: I sell fitness.

I don’t promise you anything will get better in your life because you train at my gym. If that happens, then terrific, I’m glad for you. But I will NEVER sell you on some life altering, 12-steps to bliss, plan your life goals program.

Two reason for this. First, that hasn’t happened to everyone and therefore is not a “Law”. Second, I don’t think human nature works that way, and I don’t fuck with nature because when I have tried she fucks back hard.

How hard? At least twice.

Ahhh…the 90′s. Who else misses pirate shirts?
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*Yes, this is me being delicate.
**Great article on the latest big fallout with Scientology here.
***For some fascinating history on the self-help con game in America, take a look at Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. Summary essay by the author in WSJ here. Helpful review in Houston Chronicle here. Steve Salerno’s Sham Blog here. Great look at “The Secret” that Oprah Winfrey widely praised and popularized here.

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I’ve been talking to a few other CrossFit box owners and the guys at Athlete’s Forum (which is dead, totally different URL owner now) on what we think would be a good course outline for a “semester” of learning the basics of CrossFit and the tools to do it.

With respect to tools, we decided to use the same thing that Athlete’s Forum, which is a simple video teleconference.

I’ve been working on a baseline course. The most important thing about this course, and where it differs from anything I’ve seen others offer, is the idea of seminar. Another way to put it is the experience Feynman describes as: “the joy of finding things out.”  While we want participants and tutors to discuss concrete examples of successful tactics, techniques and procedures, we need to keep in mind in our discussion that these are all heuristics, or situationally dependent.

With that in mind, here’s a syllabus that I’d like your feedback on. I realize I’m vague about the “intent” of each of these modules, but I think that generally they either cover or will lead to some valuable discussion.

Lesson 1: How to learn.

• Notes on Dialogue, Stringfellow Barr
• Taleb on the idea of a library
• Feynman on the joy of finding things out

Lesson 2: The Customer

• Crito, Plato

Lesson 3: Inter-Mural, Dealing with Competition

• How to interact with other CrossFit gyms

Lesson 4: Intra-Mural, Dealing with Competition

• How to interact with a coach/employee that wants to open their own CrossFit gym.
• How to interact with a coach/employee that opens their own CrossFit gym, and then you find out.

Lesson 5: Easy Topic: What is Human Nature

• The idea of hierarchy and social cooperation, E.O. Wilson

Lesson 6: Getting Things Done

• Division of Labor, Adam Smith

Lesson 7: Adapting and Getting Better at What You Do

• Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley

Lesson 8: Making Decision and Changing Course.

• Sortes Virgilianae
• Turning a jet ski versus turning a battleship

What other lessons are important for a CrossFit gym owner to understand?

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“How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was – such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth.” Apology, Plato

For those of you that haven’t read this or haven’t read it lately, what Socrates is saying here is that his accusers are full of shit. Note the title in its intended ironic form.

Some additional context may be necessary:

In this story, Socrates is on trial for “impiety and corrupting the youth.” What he actually was on trial for was for criticizing the leaders of Athens. The Athenian leaders fought back through this legal charade to shut Socrates up or get rid of him by exile.*

As the guys over at The Partially Examined Life point out, Socrates is doing the same thing to his accusers that he got in trouble for in the first place: criticizing their authority by pointing out they have no idea what they are doing.

Now whether or not you are a Platonist or a quasi-Platonist or a non-Platonist, you have an idea of what “being an asshole” is, and for the leaders (and many of the people) of Athens, Socrates was an asshole.**

Not only did he criticize the powerful of Athens, but he went out of his way to do it and taught others how to do it as well. He made it very clear in the Apology that he thought “the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” Inherent in this is an insult to those that don’t take the time to question or criticize.

Two Socratic questions at the heart of being the less powerful:
1) Is there any way to criticize people with more power than you and not sound like an asshole?
2) Is there any incentive to criticize people with more power than you and try to not sound like an asshole?

To attempt the first question, as a starting point you can say “it depends.” If the people you criticize accept that they can learn and adapt from criticism and that those that criticize will be held in check by a politeness that extends from their shared audience, then both parties can survive without sounding like assholes, and vice versa.

Where the incentive lies is a tricker question. The more powerful party has the capability (and if Acton is to be believed, the desire as well) to destroy the less. So the incentive is to do so.

The less powerful party, sensing that the end game in this is either destruction or capitulation, will consciously or unconsciously choose a direction right out of the gate. If he accepts destruction, then inherent in this is the incentive to “take no prisoners”. If he accepts capitulation (we could call this “providing constructive criticism”), he must necessarily change his stance on many points to satisfy his rulers.

The other very large issue in this question is the idea that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” A larger and more powerful entity will by this virtue have more visibility, or a broader outreach. If they begin to criticize, castigate, or attempt to destroy the gadfly, the gadfly will only get more attention.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb regularly points out that a very significant amount of his popularity is brought about by the established media and banking sectors saying loudly and often that he has no idea what he’s talking about.***

The thing that brought about this whole post was listening to The Partially Examined Life Podcast and reading Taleb’s latest book, Antifragile. This took me down a rabbit hole of criticism on that book and also wanting to examine why I sometimes get called an asshole, something that only bothers me when I do not mean to be so (true to the famous definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose). The most succinct piece of knowledge that I have yet to fully wrap my head around is Taleb’s quote: “English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).” The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

So where does this leave us?

As I don’t like neat conclusions, I’ll just ask two more questions to ponder in the comments or in later posts:

1) What’s the best way to manage “Arrogant-Down” as it relates to Acton’s warning about power corrupting?
2) What’s the best way to manage “Arrogant-Up” so we don’t end up like Socrates?

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*You can read a nice blow-by-blow of the trial and some background about Socrates here.
**And why not, while we’re at it:

***Taleb, who is anti-Platonist in much of what he says, uses the same technique as Socrates.

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CrossFit is inherently biological in its order. Our gyms fill a niche that was relatively empty, and as that niche fills, competition within the niche becomes greater and greater. Those CrossFit gyms that adapt correctly to their circumstances will continue to survive, grow and propagate, and those that don’t will die off.

My only prediction as to who will continue and who will not is based on the following excerpt from Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, in his lecture “Dark Materials“:

We and the biosphere are the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution, but most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That’s not so. Our Sun is less than half way through its life. We’re maybe only the half way stage. Any creatures witnessing the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence won’t be human — they’ll be as different from us as we are from bacteria.

What a CrossFit gym looked like and how it ran in 2001 versus 2012 is vastly different. What a CrossFit gym will look like in 2022 is beyond the imagination of anyone (including myself), but what I think we all know is that it will be vastly different in how it grows, survives, and propagates, but still fill a very similar niche.

Two questions, one for research and one for fun:
1) What changes have you seen in your local CrossFit gym(s) the last several years?
2) What predictions do you have for the CrossFit gyms of 2022?

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23 September 2012

Brian Wilson
Arlington, Virginia

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